BEOWULF

“Frankly,
nothing about the original poem appealed to me”, says Beowulf film
director Robert Zemeckis. “I remember being assigned to read it in junior high
school and not being able to understand it because it was in Old English. It was
one of those horrible assignments. I never really thought about it after that,
never considered that it might make for an interesting story. But when I read
the screenplay that Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary did, I was immediately
captivated.”

The poem Beowulf had
been criticized for centuries for its logic flaws. The original story, written in
Old English on thin sheets of shaved leather, doesn’t make complete sense. The
monster Grendel never attacks King Hrothgar, only torments him. Beowulf ventures
into the lair of Grendel’s mother to kill her, yet he emerges from the cave with
Grendel’s head. Based on a 6th century battle in Denmark, the poem originated
from Anglo-Saxons in northern England two hundred years later who saw themselves
not as British, but as Vikings. The key to telling the oldest epic tale in the
English language is to make sense of the original 3,000-line poem.

Beowulf screenwriters
Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery devised a clever solution to Beowulf’s logic issues.
“Basically, Neil came up with the key operator of a unified field theory of
Beowulf, which I had been working on for a decade”, says Avery. “It became
obvious to me that Beowulf had fallen prey to the same temptations I surmised
had befallen Hrothgar, the temptations of a siren. He had made a pact with a
demon.” Gaiman and Avary had worked together before on the unproduced Sandman
screenplay, based on Gaiman’s DC Comics series that won nine Will Eisner Comic
Industry Awards and three Harvey Awards. Avary co-wrote the Oscar-winning
screenplay Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino.

Given a brilliant fresh
interpretation of a classic epic, does Beowulf the movie succeed? With
powerful performances from the actors, Beowulf makes a convincing try. It
sounds like a proper British epic. Anthony Hopkins, the first actor cast, chose
to use his native Welsh accent “because Welsh is an ancient language, several
thousand years old.” Grendel speaks his lines in Old English. “Beowulf…has
a real visceral quality”, says Zemeckis. “He cares only about what he can kill,
what he can eat, who he can screw.”

"Angelina Jolie’s fully nude for the entire film!"

Zemeckis in his prior film
The Polar Express developed a technique called performance capture that he
uses again for Beowulf. “When you do a performance capture film, you have
the ability to do two forms of casting, one for performance and one for
likeness, which means you can actually separate what a character looks like in
the film from the performer who portrays that character,” says Beowulf
producer Steve Starkey. “The great thing about the technique is that it allowed
someone like me, who is 5’10” and a little on the plump side, to play a 6’6”
golden-haired Viking”, says Departed actor Ray Winstone who plays
Beowulf. Crispin Glover, as the tormented monster Grendal, is truly gross, not
merely biting the head off a victim, but chewing it thoroughly.

“Yes, she’s a monster, but
she’s also a mom, and that’s the essence behind everything she does”, says
Angelina Jolie. “Grendel’s mother is a demon and a seductress to the nth degree
and nobody can do that kind of sultry character as well as Angelina Jolie,” says
Zemeckis. “I loved it”, says Jolie. “At first, I thought, oh this is going to be
so weird, all of us actors with these dots on our faces, in these wetsuit-type
costumes, with no props or sets. But, what it really does is strip everything
down to the essentials of performing, especially in the scenes between Crispin
and me. They were just pure amazing emotion.”

“What’s interesting about this
way of acting, with no sets, no costumes, just these silly suits with dots all
over your face, is that you can do the whole scene, and it goes very quickly
because you don’t have to break it up the way you do on a conventional film”,
says Anthony Hopkins who plays King Hrothgar. Angelina Jolie actually needs no
costume for Beowulf because she doesn’t wear any. She’s fully nude for
the entire film, but as a plastic Barbie doll animated version of herself with
the naughty bits airbrushed out.

“The
key term was black box theater, that’s what got me”, says Brendan Gleeson, a
Harry Potter veteran who plays Beowulf’s
stalwart friend Wiglaf. “All the performances happen in this big square thing
and your world is created within that. It’s not blue or green screen. It’s a
completely different concept. Most of the theater I’d done in the ‘80s, for
example, was in the black box. We couldn’t afford props so we’d mime them or
create them in the audience’s head, and that’s what this process is a little bit
like. Now, all the dots and the embarrassing black suit aside, it’s the same
kind of thing, you’ve got to transport yourself within that volume.”

“One of the most serious
limitations on Polar Express was that we couldn't capture the eye
performance simultaneously with the face”, says visual effects supervisor Jerome
Chen. “And the reason was because we couldn't put dots on the eyes and track
their movement.” Jerome Chen and his visual effects team at Sony Imageworks
developed a new technology called EOG to track muscle pulses being given off by
the eye and the eyelids while simultaneously capturing the facial performance
and the body performance.

Unfortunately, the technology
of performance capture still has flaws. The eyes of the photo-realistically
animated characters often slip into a Toy Story-like lifeless stare.
Ultimately, what’s missing is the full nuance of the actor’s performances. The
monsters are more convincing. Beowulf is one of the largest 3D film
releases ever, on more than 700 screens nationwide. I enjoyed watching the IMAX
3D version at Universal in Hollywood (with glasses). It’s also being shown in
2D.

- Robin Rowe

The CG process —
the same as that used by Zemeckis in Polar Express
—
is off-putting. With their dead, unblinking eyes the characters look stoned;
more heroine addicts than heroic archetypes. Horses also hop around
unconvincingly like bunny rabbits. However, if you’re familiar with the 1000-year plus old epic poem the movie is based on, then you will be intrigued by
what script writers Neil Gaiman (of Sandman fame) and Roger Avery (Pulp Fiction)
does with the material at hand, taking the story into unexpected directions and
making some interesting comments on heroism and history in the process. Also,
some unexpected medieval grittiness adds to the overall texture of the tale. And
we just love the fact that unlike the recent Beowulf & Grendel movie starring
Gerald Butler (the Spartan King in 300) Grendel still kills off those pesky
Danes because he’s annoyed with their noisy singing and drunkenness. Anyone who
ever had to cope with noisy party-animal neighbors will surely identify! — James O'Ehley